


Down to Blood

by Heather



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Dark, F/M, Incest, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-07
Updated: 2007-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 02:55:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry drinks and has dark thoughts. Enter Aunt Petunia. Contains spoilers for/references to the series overall, but especially "Order of the Phoenix" and "Half-Blood Prince."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down to Blood

He can hear Ron and Hermione at night when they think he's asleep and not listening.

They came back with him to Privet Drive, just as they'd promised, and Harry is grateful for this in ways words cannot express. The disapproving looks he receives every day are now divided evenly between the three of them, making the weight easier to bear. Come to that, practically _everything_ is divided between the three of them these days.

All but this.

There are soft gasps and moans from the corner of his room, ink-splattered fingers tangled in fiery red hair, long limbs twisted around soft skin and sharp hisses between clenched teeth, the scolding rasp of _"shhh!"_ He usually wishes he could think of a subtle way to leave, but he can't bear to face their embarrassment, their awkwardness, that something exists that he isn't a part of. They are the most important thing he has left in his life, his last line of defense against a destiny he never wanted and a life that never wanted him.

Harry thinks of this one night, sitting alone in the Dursleys' kitchen, leaving the two of them alone for once. He has sloshed back a few ounces of fire whiskey, a gift from Fred and George to numb him against the pain. He doesn't confide its existence to anyone; he doubts it'd meet with any approval. Harry is by no means a drinker--aren't heroes forbidden to drink?--but for once, it feels good to give in to any kind of a weakness, just like anyone else.

His last line of defense, he thinks again, and a bitter, sickly part of him wants to laugh at that, because hasn't he made a career out of protecting them? How long has it been, really, since anyone protected him?

Erase. Correct. How long has it been since he's _wanted_ anyone protecting him? Protecting him has never worked out well for anybody, and he'll be damned if Ron and Hermione will be the latest on the list of casualties. He's thought about this before, the losses of everyone who stood between him and the darkness, how sooner or later, each and every one of them fell.

"What are you doing in here?" An angry, snapping voice snarls bad-temperedly behind him and he nearly sighs as he remembers: each of them fell, save one.

"I'm sitting." Harry replies rudely, toasting his aunt Petunia with a near-empty glass in a mocking sort of way. "Sitting is still allowed, I take it?"

"Don't you speak to me in that disrespectful tone." She irritably tosses back. "Get up to bed. I don't even want to think of what those--those--" It takes her a Herculean effort to spit out the word. "--those _friends_ of yours are getting up to in my house."

"They're not 'getting up' to anything." As far as lies go, it's a big one. But Harry doesn't want to think of what "those friends of his" are getting up to in her house, either. He almost wants to tell her so, watch her face twist in disgust and horror, and he wonders really which part bothers her about it all. Is it something moral and old-fashioned, or something to do with her near-phobia of germs? Or something else, Harry thinks, sipping at his glass as he ignores her angry glare at him. Is it simply that Aunt Petunia can't abide the thought of anyone enjoying anything in her house?

Aunt Petunia snorts in disgust, but chooses to ignore it. "Get up to your room."

She's not the only one who can turn a deaf ear, however. Harry drinks on.

"Did you _hear_ me?" She snaps again, her boney, horsey face coming closer to his than he ever would've liked, twisted up in a furious, sour-looking expression that he's all-too-familiar with after growing up in her care. Her nostrils twitch and then an incredulous noise leaps from her throat. "Are you _drunk?_"

"You know, I think that might be quite possible." He replies amicably, watching her face bunch up in just that much more anger.

When has he ever known her to be anything else? Seventeen straight miserable years in her house, crowding her life, treated lower than a snake in the garden, when has he ever seen anything from her but grossest hostility? And what for?

It's all down to blood, Harry thinks. Anything, everything, practically every aspect of his life up to now, all of it down to blood. His father's blood that saved his life, his mother's blood that's protecting him even now, Dumbledore's blood in that cave and Sirius' blood, pure as any but never good enough and not a drop spilled when he went through the veil--

Oh, but he doesn't want to think about that. Right now, he wants his mind here, in the present, where it belongs. On Aunt Petunia and her ugly face and the fact that he's stuck with her.

Down to blood.

Later, Harry was never sure how far he meant for it to go, but perhaps "far" and "meant" were just stupid words, anyway, that didn't mean anything after all.

His hands seize her shoulders hard, hard enough to leave faint hand-shaped bruises, and he jumps up as he does, shoving her against a wall.

"How _dare_ you--you nasty, evil, foul little--" She starts to snarl, struggling to pry his fingers off, and Harry is distantly pleased, in a way that makes him sick, of how frightened she looks underneath all the anger. Finally, something in her face for him that isn't disgust.

"Shut up." He cuts her off, squeezing harder into her arms and breathing hard through his nose as he takes her in. That face that has never held anything for him but scorn.

_Mother is the face of God for all children,_ he thinks, and tries to remember where he heard that. It makes him really desperately want to laugh.

"I really hate you." Harry whispers right into her face. Then he kisses her hard on the mouth.


End file.
